Shame: Speech professional pay must be raised to close gap in services

The inability of the Guam Department of Education to provide speech services to children with special needs is shameful and must be rectified as quickly as possible.

The education agency has just 22 speech personnel -- 10 speech pathologists and 12 clinicians -- to service more than 1,000 students who require speech services. This means that children who desperately require this special-needs service at times get no assistance. In the coming school year, it's expected that about 27 students at one school won't receive any speech services for an entire semester.

It's disgraceful that this failure to meet a basic need is so commonplace and accepted by education officials and public servants. Speech therapy and other services are critical to the development of students -- not just improving their ability to communicate, but also in fostering self-confidence and self-assurance.

Would Guam Department of Education administrators, members of the Guam Education Board or elected officials allow students at a public school to go for an entire semester without English or math instruction because of a lack of teachers? Or force them to go without lunch because there weren't enough cafeteria servers or cooks?

While the nation in general is seeing a shortage of speech pathologists, a major part of the problem in filling the gaps in Guam public schools is the pay -- about $38,000 a year. In 2010, the national average salary for a speech pathologist working in a school was $61,000 in 2010, while the median pay was about $67,000. It's difficult, if not impossible, to recruit professionals for hard-to-fill positions if you pay barely more than half of what they could earn elsewhere.

To reduce the gaps in speech services in our public schools, the local government needs to increase the pay for speech pathologists. The school system must be able to offer prospective speech professionals competitive salaries and benefits packages.

School and elected officials should be ashamed of their failure to address this shortfall, which has persisted for years. And they must take quick action to ensure it's fixed as quickly as possible.